Music Station not playing FLAC following update

[robanstey]

Hi Everyone,

All my music is in FLAC format and until recently played happily through Music Station accessed through the web interface via my PC. Following recent updates this no longer works and instead I get a pop-up message (see attachment) stating (incorrectly) that my browser only supports MP3 and that to play the files I must enable Flash. If I do enable Flash it then works but it is then downsampling to MP3 and sounds horrible. This fault is across both Chrome and Firefox and on multiple machines. Music played through the QMusic app is unaffected.

I raised a support ticket for this but the 'help' was terrible - the person I was talking to couldn't understand the problem despite reproducing it and I left the conversation at the point where he was talking about a new feature request.

I would like to try rolling back to a previous version but can't find any to install. Has anyone else encountered this issue and if so how did you resolve it? My guess is that the update broke proper browser recognition which is a common enough fault, especially if someone hard-coded browser versions, but I can't even get the help desk to see it as a fault so there's no likelihood of a fix.

My logs show version 5.0.4 installed 27/04/2017 and 5.0.5 installed 12/05/2017. My memory is a bit hazy on this but I thought there were more updates than this. In any case the fault seems to have come in when the major revamp happened and the Spotlight/Manage switch was introduced.

Any light you can shed on this would be a great help. If I can get an earlier version to try out I may be able to open a new ticket and get some proper help to resolve this.

Thanks in advance.

My QNAP system is:
TS-435A
Firmware: 4.3.3.0188
Music Station v5.0.5

Accessed via:
Windows 10 PC & laptop
Chrome version 58.0.3029.110 64-bit
Firefox 53.0.2 32-bit

[nickc]

Hi, I'm not sure if this will be helpful or not, but at least it's a response! I can't comment on the specific questions you raise as I don't use Music Station and don't intend to. And I don't access or play my musicI via a web browser either. Instead I use MinimServer (running on the QNAP), BubbleUpnp as controller (in my case running on an Android tablet, but it runs on other platforms), and Volumio as renderer/player (in my case running on a Raspberry Pi connected to my hi-fi, but Volumio also runs on several platforms.) Apart from providing performance second to none (MinimServer is a masterpiece of software) this setup certainly plays FLAC (and other lossless formats) and all three software components have active, intelligent and highly supportive developers. It might be worth your while checking out: http://minimserver.com/index.html & https://volumio.org/discover/ (if you play your music on/through a pc, you might not need Bubbleupnp - see the advice on MinimServer site re running on pc or NAS)

[robanstey]

Thanks nickc for making the effort to reply.
In the long run my intention is to set up something like you describe but lacking the time to dive into getting such a thing set up properly (at the moment my hi-fi is boxed up) I opted for the default Music Station as it played FLAC files via USB without the Raspberry Pi component (I tested this before boxing things up) so at least I had a solution, if not a good one. As far as I know it still does play FLAC files, just not through the browser. I play through the browser just to have some music while working on the PC so it's not a huge deal, just very annoying that a QNAP update broke it. Music Station is a bit of a disaster as far as music players go, as is QMusic, and something like MinimServer would do a much better job for sure. I'll look into this option later on when I'm in a position to get the hi-fi set up again.
More concerning in general is how poor the help was: makes me wonder how much trouble I'd be in if something more fundamental broke.

[nickc]

Hi again. I'm pretty sure you don't need to wait till your hi-fi is set up again; you could use MinimServer on the NAS to play music on your pc without the need for Music Station or your browser. I don't know what platform you're on, but Windows Media Player works with MinimServer (with limited browsing choice) and there must surely be applications on the other main platforms that do too.
I take your point about support. I've found it very hit and miss. Sometimes it's excellent, at others you end up realising you have a much better understanding of the issue than the technician at the other end!
Good luck anyway!

[robanstey]

Hi nickc. I took you advice and installed MinimServer - didn't realise it was going to be that easy - and am now streaming through Media Player as you suggested. Many thanks for your helpful suggestions!

[nickc]

Great! You're very welcome.

[Aender84]

Hello, even though the thread seems a bit old, the problem is still actual for my case. i'm trying to play flac files on my Sonos system but i keep getting an error as the network connection is not good enough. this is deffinetly not the case as i have good connection and i'm also playing 4K videos over the same network. i'm having similar issues when trying to play flac or wave files on my phone through QMusic app. do you know what might be the issue here? related to the MinimServer, i dont know if i can add it on the Sonos to be able to access it and play from it. what i do, is just add my nas in the library as a folder and play from there

even if trying to play directly on the NAS, with the QMusic app, the flac files are still not running.... so annoyied

[OneCD]

* topic locked to prevent further necroposting *